


Hope, Perhaps

by nottonyharrison



Series: Of Duty and Related Stories [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Background Rex/Cody and Rex/Ahsoka, Breathplay, Dead Character POV, Depressing af, Dubiously Underage Characters, Existentialism, F/M, Fighting As Foreplay, Grief/Mourning, Jealousy, LBR no matter how much you argue about clones and their biological age it's still an issue, Non-Graphic Violence, Parallel Universes, Rough Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and I mean Un. Health. Y, partially at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:13:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29533206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nottonyharrison/pseuds/nottonyharrison
Summary: And in another universe, somewhere else in spacetime, she’s standing over Rex, hands on his temples, repeating a mantra. A prayer to the force, a prayer to give him back his mind.Where is Cody? Cody is lost to the Empire.But that’s not at this point in the infinite expanse of infinite universes. At this point, there’s Cody, and there’s Ahsoka.Cody and Ahsoka. For Rex.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Ahsoka Tano
Series: Of Duty and Related Stories [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2133786
Comments: 7
Kudos: 37





	Hope, Perhaps

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I have accepted that this story was never going to be fun, but I wasn't expecting it to be this fucking depressing so I'm sorry about that. Full speed ahead to mourning as an aphrodisiac, people. Click the back button if you can't handle the jandal.
> 
> This is a spinoff story from chapter 5 of Of Duty, a foray into the alternate universe Ahsoka and Rex experience in their shared dream.

Somewhere else in the great endless expanse that is space and time, Rex had died.

It was anticlimactic, a minor misstep in battle that had ended with a blaster bolt between the eyes, a smoldering hole left in his helmet and a void where parts of his frontal and parietal lobes had once been.

They’d still won the battle, captured the city, and forced out the Separatist presence. His death hadn’t changed the outcome, and had only been a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

A year or so earlier, he had pondered what would become of him after the war. Well, not just him, but the rest of the clone army, his brothers, his friends. He’d never found out, and he supposes that was kind of the point. He hadn’t been cloned to survive it, none of them had. Why he had even entertained the idea when his purpose had been so clear from the beginning, he didn’t know.

Hope, perhaps? Hope that he could have had a little apartment somewhere, with enough room for a table and chairs for the occasional dinner party. Hope for a proper bed, with a cover in his favorite shade of green, and pillows that for once didn’t feel like Geonosian sandstone. Hope that he could have had normal relationships that weren’t born of necessity and circumstance.

He can see it clearly now, it was _that_ moment. The first domino. Was it the hope that had made him do it? The thing that had triggered the whole sequence of events? He’d like to think so, but he knows it was more likely desperation and sadness. Standing at the bottom of the steps, in full view of anyone who happened to be walking past the temple, begging her to stay, to keep her loyalty to an order who had been so quick to throw her under the speeder.

And Ahsoka hadn’t hesitated, really. She’d said yes before Rex had even finished the patented Captain Rex Inspirational Speech he’d been practicing in the fresher for the last hour. He hadn’t even got to the good bit, where he said rousing things about the 501st and their loyalty to her being more important than anything the Jedi could do. That through the whole mess, all they could talk about was having their Commander back, with her bright smile, her bravery in the face of insurmountable odds, and her loyalty that meant she could never commit the atrocity she was accused of. That they loved her. That _he_ loved her.

But he hadn’t got to that bit

He hadn’t blurted out the words that had been threatening to escape for months now, held back only by his confusion and discomfort around their preposterous circumstances. Not the war, or rank, but the whole _age_ thing. And he supposes the Cody thing too, but that’s a whole 'nother problem.

He still can’t really get his head around the chronological versus physiological age discordance. He’s thirteen, but he’s twenty-six, and he doesn’t feel like either. He feels like both. Well he’s really not either now though, is he?

And he can’t even argue that he’s more _mature_ than Ahsoka, because really he’s mature in all the same ways Ahsoka is, for the same reasons and through startlingly similar circumstance. Minus the lightsabers and Jedi magic woo-woo stuff, anyway. 

None of it matters now though, because he’s dead. In another universe, in another life, he’s still alive and fighting, but she’s not by his side. In this universe, he’s just another casualty of an increasingly pointless war, dragged off the battlefield and given a burial in space only because of his rank.

It’s nice here, floating in the empty. The galaxy is more beautiful than he’s ever experienced, no transparisteel or atmosphere to distort the pricks of light. He’s close to a nebula, he’s not sure which one, and the shape of it is clear enough to see defined areas of color. Purple, pink, blue and yellow all together to create a shape that’s not much more than an egg-shaped blob, but it’s breathtaking nonetheless.

Except he doesn’t have any breath. He’s dead.

He wonders if this is what eternity will be like. Just him drifting through space, slowly moving at the same speed he’d been ejected until he’s caught in the gravity of a star in a couple of hundred thousand years. Will he become something else, then, or will he just watch the fury of an explosion for the next billion years until it burns itself out? Maybe he’ll get to experience a black hole from the inside.

He’s kind of glad he didn’t die face down in the mud on some boggy planet, armor too discolored from weeks marching over grimy land and sleeping on dirt, for anyone to notice him.

So Captain Rex, CT-7567, clone trooper of the Grand Army of the Republic drifts, his mind given to the force. And he isn’t happy, but he is at peace.

…

In the same universe, on a ship orbiting a city planet, there is no mission, but there is also no peace.

Along with the constant dark cloud of large scale conflict, this ship itself is home to an unsettling air of gloom, the grief of its occupants permeating the air - something the carbon dioxide scrubbers can’t remove no matter their capacity.

In a half empty hangar bay with three durasteel walls, a double sealed door, and only a ray shield separating them from the mind bending expanse of the galaxy, two people battle to remind themselves they are more than just soldiers and tools of the Republic. They battle to reassure themselves that loss can’t always be dealt with by talking, or just outright ignoring it, and that if they want to grieve by beating the shit out of each other then that’s their right as commanders.

The back of a gloved hand striking skin. Thighs wrapped around a neck, and a choked breath before a helmeted head is slammed into the deck. A complicated flip of the legs, and the reversal of positions, this time with a hand pressing into a windpipe until an orange palm slaps down twice and a choked out _I give_.

Cody stares down at Ahsoka for a few moments, his hand still wrapped around her neck. Her pupils almost block out the blue of her iris, and she tries to buck him off before going limp. She lets out a weak cough before a tear leaks out the corner of her eye, and he’s snapped back to himself, scrambling off her and bumping into a munitions crate.

“Kriff, I… sorry.”

Ahsoka coughs and rolls on her side, curling in on herself. Something like a sob, and then a low pitched scream of anguish before she’s pressing her forehead into the cold metal of the deck, tears and drool and snot pooling on the cold metal, gasping and shuddering until the pricking at Cody’s eyes has turned into hot tears rolling down his cheeks and dripping off his chin onto the interior padding of his bucket. He tears the helmet off, and tosses it as far across the hanger as he can, hangs his head, and cries.

There’s an adjacency where Cody was doing something entirely different, a point in time that sits alongside this one, parallel but not quite overlapping. There’s an order, and rather than remembering who he is he forgets. Rather than grieving someone he loves, he orders an execution.

But that’s irrelevant, because this isn’t that Cody. This isn’t that Ahsoka.

In three days, Chancellor Palpatine will be dead. Something about Rex’s desperate plea all those months ago had dealt this universe a different hand. A path leading to a period of peace for the galaxy. The peace wouldn’t last, but then when does it ever? A few hundred years of little conflict before the Sith threat rears its ugly head once again.

But Cody and Ahsoka don’t know any of that. They only know what is now… here in this version of the universe. And for them, that is sorrow and rage.

He doesn’t really know what to do when they both eventually calm. She’s still lying there, breath unsteady but no longer panicked. Her eyes are closed tight. Her fingers twitch as if she’s about to push herself up, but she speaks instead.

“I know you loved him, too.”

His heart leaps in his chest, panic coursing through his synapses until his breath comes in short bursts. He pushes himself up, stalks over to where his helmet lies, slightly dented from hitting the bulkhead, and leaves the hangar without a word.

…

Ahsoka stands silently at the door of the troopers’ communal fresher. The only occupant stands with a clenched fist leaning against the plasteel wall, water running over his bowed head.

She’s cleaned herself up. Splashed some water on her face, brushed her teeth, and put some eye drops in her eyes to get rid of the lingering taste and feel of tears.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she blurts out.

The muscles of Cody’s back twitch, but he doesn’t make a move to cover himself. He spits out a mouthful of water. “Get out, Ahsoka.”

She crosses her arms, and looks down at the floor. “I mean… maybe Master Kenobi is right and we should, I don’t know… I know they don’t offer you minders but maybe I can help with that?”

There’s a thump, and the shower shuts off. “I don’t need a shrink, and I don’t need you poking around in my brain.” The sound of someone running a towel over skin, and then he’s pushing past her to the door panel, not bothering to acknowledge she was even in the way.

“It would just be meditation,” she says, trailing after him into the passage. “Cody--”

“Commander,” he spits out, half turning back. His eyes flash, and she flinches. He stops, only partially facing her. “And as the Marshall Commander of this corps, and _your_ superior officer, I am _ordering_ you to leave it alone.”

Ahsoka swallows, and presses her lips together, before looking down at her arms, still folded over one another, hands gripping biceps. A flash of pure rage fires through her brain. “You know what? Kriff you, _Commander_. Kriff you and all your stoic repressed stick up your ass banthashit.” She drops her arms and takes a step closer, fangs extending far enough to flash in the bright imitation of natural light. He’s staring, eyes blank and focused on a computer panel, jaw twitching. Her lips are almost close enough to brush his ear when she says the words that make him snap. “You think I don’t know you were fucking him?”

It happens faster than she can react, one second he’s staring at the wall, the next she’s being dragged along by the arm, his grip tight enough to bruise. She lets it happen, only stumbling a couple of times before he’s tossing her into her own quarters and following behind. He punches in a code, and the door slides shut with a beep and a click.

When he turns, they stare at each other, animosity flying around the room until the charged atmosphere starts to feel heavy and thick.

She’s seen him angry before, but not like this. His expression is murderous, like he wants to destroy something. Maybe her. Maybe she would welcome it, like she had in the hangar until it had all become too much. She shudders.

She knows that’s _not what she meant_ , but all of a sudden she remembers she’s in a small officer’s cabin with Marshal Commander Cody, pride of the GAR, who is wearing nothing but a small white towel that’s been through a bleach wash one too many times, and she _wants._

He’s bigger than Rex, all muscular shoulders and corded arms that look like they could hold her up for hours.

It’s not about them though, is it? It’s about Rex.

Rex who was stoic and rigid, until he wasn’t. Until he was soft and vulnerable, and loyal until you crossed a line and he called you an idiot. Cody’s not like Rex, yes he’s stoic and rigid, but when he lets himself free he’s full of rage and passion in a way that scares her sometimes. And Ahsoka? She’s always always been soft and vulnerable beneath the brash and headstrong, and she hates it.

Her eyes drift back up his body until they lock on his. She runs her tongue over her teeth, fangs only partially retracted, and takes a breath. “I never told him, you know,” she says.

“Stop it.”

“Do you wanna know why?”

“ _Stop it_.”

Ahsoka takes a couple of steps, and jabs him in a buff pec with a small pointy finger. “Because how can I compete with all of this?”

There’s a flutter beneath the skin of his neck, not the tense of muscles but the pound of his carotid.

“What would have happened, I wonder,” she says, hand creeping up his torso until her palm presses against his throat, his pulse thumping against her skin. “In another universe, where he’s still alive? Where the war’s over and you’re free.”

Cody swallows, and she flashes her fangs. “Do you think you’d have a nice little home together, on Coruscant? With a kitchen, and a sofa, and a bed where you could have fucked him whenever you wanted?”

His eyes flutter closed, and she leans in closer. His breath is hot on her skin, and she can feel the storm in his mind, a mess of entangled emotions that are screaming something she can’t quite make out.

When he finally speaks it’s broken, like his vocal cords are frayed. “It was always you.”

She hums. A question, not an acknowledgement.

“With him. It was an apartment,” he says. There’s a movement against her palm as he swallows again, thick and deliberate. “There was a dining table, and dinner parties. And you were… you were always there when he talked about it.” Cody’s eyes harden, and he grabs her wrist. “He always loved you more than he loved me.”

The rage is back, burning through Ahsoka’s veins and she squeezes. “You know what, fuck you.” She lets go of his neck, and shoves him hard against the bulkhead, a combination of her free hand, and the force. “You don’t get to guilt trip me into feeling sorry for you.”

Cody yanks her closer, fingers as tight as before, another bruising grip. She falls into him, and her heart thuds in her chest as he reverses their position. Her feet dangle, her body held up by his hand under her shoulder, and the press of his chest against hers. Time freezes.

The kiss is rough, all teeth, barely there stubble, and the too hard press of lips that mirror Cody’s fingers around her wrist. Ahsoka makes a noise in her throat that makes him jerk away. He rests his forehead against hers, noses touching from bridge to tip. His breath is shaky and his voice strained “I…”

“Do it,” she whispers. Her thighs still ache from the hold she had him in earlier, but she wraps them around his waist anyway, using her heel to push the barely hanging on towel to the floor. “Fuck me. Close your eyes and pretend I’m him.”

It’s stupid, she knows it is, she’s not the right gender, or even the right species, but Cody whimpers. Ahsoka runs her free hand up his neck, into his curly hair. He lets go of her wrist, finally, and drops the hand to the hem of her skirt, shoving it up until he can get his hands on the waistband of her leggings.

His skin is so warm, so alive. His eyes are still squeezed shut tight, and his breath comes in stifled gasps, like he’s barely holding on to a tiny thread of control. She kisses him, and this time it’s different. It’s messy and wet, Cody’s tongue rolling against hers, lips soft and pliant and oh _force_ he’s got his palm flat against her tooka, rubbing her in a way that makes her moan into his mouth and rip her head away. His nose bumps her lek, and his words resonate in her montrals. “Say his name when you come.”

Ahsoka only manages a small nod, before his lips are on hers again, and he’s disentangling her legs from around his waist, dropping to his knees and tugging off her boots, then her leggings. Oh his _tongue_. Shit. He licks a stripe from back to front, and she throws her head against the wall before he tosses her legs over his shoulders and pushes her higher.

Cody rests his head against her dress for a moment. She can feel his hesitation skirting the edges of her mind, and it’s a few moments before he speaks. “The hold.”

Ahsoka wrinkles her brow markings, and makes a _huh_ noise.

“Like before, in the hangar. Put me in that hold.”

And oh shit, he’s wrecked. Voice deeper and rougher than she’s ever heard before, like he’s been inhaling tibanna fumes for days, loopy on oxygen deprivation and carbon monoxide. Her stomach drops, her body telling Ahsoka that, at least on her own part, this is just as much about lust as it is comfort. She sucks in a sharp breath before locking her ankles behind his head, grips a pipe near the ceiling, and shoving the fingers of her free hand back into his hair.

Cody somehow manages to maneuver his hand into a position where he can press into her, rubbing and massaging until his request from before is ringing in her head. She loses herself for a moment, barely regaining control before her legs tighten a little too much. _Say his name._

“Oh, kriff.” She bites her lip. She’s so close, _so close_. And oh shit, his tongue is… “Fuck, Cody.” She lets go of his hair, and curls in on herself, dropping her feet and running the heel of her hand down his neck until her palm is flat in between his shoulders.

 _Say his name_.

“Rex,” she gasps out, before letting out a half grunt, half whine that echoes around the sparse room. It’s not nice, not like the last few times she’d fucked someone. It’s a pulsing tension that snaps, then echoes through her muscles until she’s desperate for more, for something bigger than a couple of fingers to grip on to. She clenches a final time before ripping his head away by his hair. Cody makes an aborted sound, something that almost sounds like pain, or anguish, before shoving her legs from his shoulders, and moving back up her body, dragging her dress with him.

It lands on the floor with a wet sound, heavy with the combination of the weighty fabric and her sweat. Ahsoka bangs her montrals against durasteel as Cody trails his lips up her torso, and shakes her head.

“No, turn me around and shove me against the wall.”

He nods. “Yeah, yeah okay.”

The cold metal is against her front moments later, her nipples feeling the chill through her bra, and his lips oh so warm as they trail up her back until he’s biting down on her rear lek. He puts his palm flat against the fatty tissue and pushes. “This okay?”

“Harder.” His dick is hard against her ass, and she wriggles until it’s resting between her cheeks. “It’s okay you won’t hurt me.”

He moves his mouth to her shoulder. “You don’t know that,” he says, barely more than a whisper.

Ahsoka takes his other hand, and rests it against her hip. “Yeah, I do,” she says, soft and emphatic. She guides his fingers to her clit, before reaching behind and moving his cock into the right spot, the spot where she can just press backwards a tiny bit and he’s… oh yeah he’s… “Fuck.”

The noise she makes is probably undignified, but she can’t bring herself to care. He’s shoving her face hard into the durasteel bulkhead, her cheek aching with the pressure. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees his eyes, dark and shining in the low light for just a moment before he squeezes them shut again.

“Shit, Cody--”

“Don’t say my name.”

Ahsoka shudders. She knows how this started, she knew what she was getting herself into, but all of a sudden it’s like there’s a void in her chest, and she slaps her hand hard twice against the wall. He staggers back, expression wild and panicked. “I shouldn’t… we shouldn’t… oh _kriff_ what did I do?”

She pushes away from the wall, and turns. “Hey, hey no hey it’s okay.” Two tentative steps, until she’s got her palm flat against his cheek, rubbing her thumb over the soft skin and holding his eyes with hers. “I just wanted to…” She doesn’t have the words, so instead she kisses him, soft and sweet and filled with all the longing and sadness she’s struggled to contain for days. Weeks. Months. _Years._

It takes a tug on his lower lip with a fang before he kisses her back. The force sings when he does, shining bright in her mind like a viewport pointed straight at a star. She leaps up, wrapping her legs around his waist once again, and pulling her face from his for a moment. “You okay?”

His eyes flutter open, and he nods. “Are you?”

Somewhere else, another Ahsoka sees what happens next, after her reply. Feels the rage and pain and desperation of the previous half hour, but _sees_ how it ends. Pressed up against the bulkhead by Cody’s strong, tan body, his mouth and hips slamming into hers, until she rips her face to the right and squeezes her eyes shut, a groan bitten back and tears stinging her eyes. Another Ahsoka sees her as she tightens her legs around Cody’s waist, and spasms.

But there’s another presence tickling the edge of her mind, and suddenly the Ahsoka of here and now feels overwhelmed with a brief stab of shame after the euphoria dissipates. 

Then that shame is gone, after Cody jerks against her, his body trembling and skin breaking out in bumps as his sweat cools in the chilly recycled air, and she’s lying in her bunk with a warm cloth between her legs and an even warmer body pressed against the length of her right side.

“Where do we go from here?” she asks, and Cody tosses the cloth to the corner of the room.

His hand snakes down her arm, until his fingers tangle with hers and he squeezes. “We survive. For him.”

Ahsoka wipes her wet cheeks, and sucks in an unsteady breath. “Yeah… for him.”

And in another universe, somewhere else in spacetime, she’s standing over Rex, hands on his temples, repeating a mantra. A prayer to the force, a prayer to give him back his mind.

_I am one with the force, and the force is with me._

_I am one with the force, and the force is with me._

_I am one with the force, and the force is with me._

Where is Cody? Cody is lost to the Empire.

_Blast him._

But that’s not at this point in the infinite expanse of infinite universes. At this point, there’s Cody, and there’s Ahsoka.

Cody and Ahsoka. For Rex.

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me on [tumblr](http://nottonyharrison.tumblr.com/ask)


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